Thinking about The Trial again, and I was fortunate to see it again fairly recently, two questions came to me:

Did Terry Gilliam see The Trial before he made Brazil?

And

Did Patrick MacGoohan see The Trial before he made The Prisoner?

Visually The Trial is absolutely distinctive, one of the few movies that you could recognize from virtually any frame. Tony Perkins is of course perfect casting for Josef K, and he actually acts the part as opposed to falling into the Tony Perkins impression with which he earned his living later on (in Murder on the Orient Express, for example). The rest of the cast is good as well (Jeanne Moreau as Miss Burstner, Welles as Hastler the Advocate, Akim Tamiroff as Block), but the film succeeds or fails on Perkins and he carries it off.

Second billing behind Perkins should probably go to the sets. Unlike Gilliam's Brazil, Welles didn't have the budget to build anything, but he found some amazing locations in several different countries, mostly emphasizing both towering size and labyrinthine confusion. The main location he used was the Gare d'Orsay, a deserted railroad station in Paris which has since been turned into a museum.

The Trial is much more directly comparable to Brazil than The Prisoner, but both comparisons are interesting. In contrast with Brazil (and Kafka, for that matter), K is defiant to the end. He is doomed, but he dies on his own terms.

The Prisoner is more like the flip side of The Trial. Rather than sets and people being overtly threatening and ominous, MacGoohan takes a type of setting that is extremely sunny and familiar (at least to English audiences) and makes it threatening by adding just a few jarring notes of incongruity. And, of course, Number Six is always unbending (unlike Josef K, who always seems to feel as if he might possibly be guilty of whatever it is he's being accused of), and finally is more or less victorious.

In any case, The Trial is one of Welles' best films, definitely worth seeing.

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Directed by Welles from his own novel, this is the only movie he ever made that was not from somebody else's story. It is not strong, and the editing (not by Welles, of course) was terrible. You would probably be better off reading the book (even though Welles later claimed that he hadn't actually written it, or even read it).

However, its faults aside, this movie is important for one reason, which is the story of the scorpion. Mr. Arkadin, a rich and powerful man (played by Welles) tells this story at a party. I paraphrase:

A scorpion wishes to cross a stream, but scorpions cannot swim. So, he asks a frog to carry him across on his back. The frog refuses, saying that the scorpion will sting him. The scorpion points out that if he stings the frog while they are going across the river, they will both drown.

The frog sees the logic of this argument, and starts across, bearing the scorpion on his back. Halfway across, he feel the scorpion's sting. "Is this logic?" he cries as they sink beneath the water.

"No, it is not," replies the scorpion, "but I can't help myself. It is my character."

This story is very important for understanding the view of human nature which Welles brought to all of his work. In most of his films, there are scorpions and frogs, and the scorpions always keep to their true nature even when it means their own destruction.

It is even important for understanding how he conducted his career (see my review of Ambersons for his comments on his films). He had to make his films his way, to be true to his character.

(The story is already familiar to anybody who has seen The Crying Game, of course.)

Later: Welles' original version of the movie is available on the Criterion Collection DVD, which includes three versions of the movie in total. It is much improved over the versions which had been generally available until now. It does not alter the meaning of the film (unlike Touch of Evil), but it does make a much better story, focusing the attention on the most interesting character (and the best performance).

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Othello is much better than Macbeth. I first saw Othello at the Public Theater in 1978 on a double bill with a documentary called Filming Othello. It (Othello) was filmed all over Europe (as was usual with Welles during this period), with he and other members of the cast getting whatever other work they could to raise money to keep the production going (including Welles' "The Lives of Harry Lime" radio show for the BBC, which is quite good). One murder scene was filmed in a Turkish bath because they had no costumes and no money.

It was made right after Macbeth (it took three years to make), and it won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1952. As always with Welles' Shakespeare films, he is quite liberal ("savage" might be a better word) with the text, realizing that the point is to make a good movie, not to make a reverent one. And he succeeds, it is a very powerful movie. Unlike Macbeth it was all shot on location, and the castles and ships and so on are used to very good effect. And Welles' old friend Michael MacLiammoir (a Dublin stage actor who had never been in a movie before), who was brought in at the last minute to play Iago when Everett Sloan bailed out, is excellent.

Like many of Welles' films, it begins with the end of the story, the funeral of Othello and Desdemona. Welles wanted the audience to concentrate on the working out of the characters' fates, rather than just wondering how it was going to end, plus it evened the playing field between those who were familiar with the play and those who weren't.

I have rented Othello and the restored version is very good. It does, however, come with an introduction by Welles' daughter where she talks about the film, and she says that it hasn't been seen since the middle 1950s, and that the negative was thought to be lost. As I said, I saw it back in 1978 (or it could have been 1979), so it seems they're making it into even more of a "lost" masterpiece than it is.

"Orson Welles' Macbeth leaves the spectator deaf and blind and I can well believe that the people who like it (and I am proud to be one) are few and far between . . ."

(Jean Cocteau)

Welles was not one to be dissuaded from filming the legendarily cursed play. His Macbeth was an experiment in movie-making, and not a completely successful one.

It was shot in three weeks for under $200,000 for (of all things) Republic Pictures, mostly known as a "B" picture studio. Welles thought that if he succeeded, other directors would tackle challenging projects by substituting creativity and primitive images for lavish sets and production values. Also, he wanted to disprove the assertion that dogged him for his entire career that he couldn't complete a movie on time and within budget.

The result was a powerful film in its way, but mainly for people who are already familiar with the play. If somebody didn't know Macbeth, you probably wouldn't introduce them to it with this movie. It was all shot on sound-stages, with much mist and strange lighting and shadows. The costumes are clunky-looking and primitive (some quite realistic for the era of the play). The cast is composed of Welles' stalwarts, some radio performers and even a few members of Welles' family. He tried to get Agnes Moorehead to play Lady Macbeth (which would have helped quite a bit) but her schedule didn't permit it, so he cast Jeanette Nolan instead. Welles himself (of course) played Macbeth.

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Orson Welles directed eleven movies during his lifetime. His movie-making career spanned more than thirty years, and eleven movies isn't very many movies to make in thirty years, but he had quite a few difficulties, only some of them of his own making. In addition, most of his movies were not released in exactly the form he intended, and sometimes they were even edited without his participation.

The common idea many people have about Welles is that he peaked early and then fizzled out. After all, Citizen Kane was recently cited as the best American movie ever (which it isn't) and it was the first movie he ever directed, at the age of 24. This is easy to think, though, since both Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons (his second movie) are clearly great films, and after that much of his work was done outside the traditional studio system, and often outside the United States.

However, even though his later movies were usually made for almost no money, often under very difficult conditions, they are all worth seeing, and several of them are as good as any movies ever made by anybody.

Few people except real film buffs (and probably not that many of them) have seen all of Welles' films in theaters. They (the films, not the film buffs) are very hard to see, many of them are not easily available even on video, but I have seen them all (in theaters), since I was lucky enough to live in New York during the golden age of the movie revival houses, before video killed them off. Some of the movies I haven't seen in many years, however, so I have used some reference materials in order to make sure I don't go completely off the tracks.

Oh, about Citizen Kane specifically? If you haven't seen it, go and see it immediately. If you have seen it, go see it again. Virtually everything you've ever heard about it is true.

Later: If you have seen it several times, get the DVD with the commentary track by Roger Ebert. You'll learn a lot.

"If I had learned to compromise more, I might have made better films, but they wouldn't have been my films."

(Orson Welles, when he was given the American Filmmakers Institute Lifetime Achievement Award – quoted from memory)

"This is the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!"

(Orson Welles, referring to a movie studio)

"I don't love films. I love making films."

(Orson Welles)

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